Typically, the Venice Biennale’s national pavilions play second fiddle to the main exhibition—which is ironic, considering that there is about as much art, if not more, on view in them than what’s contained in the Arsenale and the Giardini combined. But this year, with a main exhibition that called into question the notion of countries altogether, it was not possible to ignore the national pavilions.
Even before the Biennale began, controversy surrounded the Israel Pavilion, whose presence many denounced in the month leading up to the show. That pavilion shuttered on the first morning of the Biennale’s preview days, with its artist, Ruth Patir, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and a hostage release agreement, and leaving on view just one work visible from outside. That wasn’t enough to quell protests over Israel’s presence, but it was enough to ensure that other pavilions worthy of notice got the attention they deserved.
This batch of pavilions mulled colonialism and feminism, violent wars and climatological disasters, museums and their discontents. On the whole, the pavilions were much better this time around than what was seen at the last art Biennale, in 2022, whose sad national contributions were memorably labeled “appalling” by New York Times critic Jason Farago. Most seemed to receive this Biennale’s pavilions with more warmth.
Below, a look at the 10 best national pavilions at the 2024 Venice Biennale—minus the Holy See’s show, whose inaccessibility has rankled a number of people who wanted to see it. That pavilion, which sets works by Maurizio Cattelan, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, and others in a functioning women’s prison on the island of Giudecca, is available only by reservation, and there are few slots daily. If you can’t get there, and good luck trying to do that, there is, at least, Emily Watlington’s review in Art in America.
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Brazil
Image Credit: ©Rafa Jacinto/Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo While just about every national pavilion in this Biennale name-checks colonialism at some point, few here represent the exploitation of the Global South as an ongoing phenomenon. That makes Glicéria Tupinambá’s Hãhãwpuá Pavilion, her name for the structure more often called the Brazilian Pavilion, stand out. This year, the pavilion houses works by Glicéria and other members of her community. In one installation called Equilíbrio (Balance, 2020–24), on top of a pile of dirt, Olinda Tupinambá places a monitor showing fires consuming forests where the Tupinambá people live. These are the pavilion’s sole images of the destruction caused by landowners, but it is enough to remind viewers of what Glicéria’s people face daily. Generally, however, she is more focused on modes of self-preservation, offering footage of Tupinambá members of the Serra do Padeiro community sewing nets, which are used for fishing. One net hangs over the installation Dobra do tempo infinito (Fold of Infinite Time, 2024); to walk inside it feels like entering a sanctum.
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Great Britain
Image Credit: Photo Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images For several decades, John Akomfrah has specialized in unfurling grand postcolonial narratives across multipart film installations, but even by his own standards, his pavilion contains a head-spinning amount of screens. His latest project, Listening All Night To The Rain, is filled with hours and hours of footage, plus a good deal of sound playing independently of it, and is virtually impossible to take in during a single visit. That would be a good reason to avoid this pavilion like the plague were it not for the fact that Akomfrah seems to intend it that way. The Windrush Generation, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Rachel Carson’s writings, the Vietnam War, impending ecological doom: these are among the many tesserae in this Ghanaian-born artist’s latest audiovisual mosaic, which implies that every struggle embroiling the Global South is interconnected.
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Japan
Image Credit: Photo Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images The quirkiest pavilion of this Biennale goes to Japan, in which sculptor Yuko Mohri has presented an array of jury-rigged contraptions composed of piping and refuse. Water is awkwardly pumped through, causing them to periodically jiggle the cymbals and chimes attached. Everything here, from the fans to the pans to the spigots to the wood tables, was sourced from shops and stands near the Biennale, a festival that prides itself upon a veneer of perfection. Mohri delights in the cracks that show when systems start to fail, revealing all that goes into maintaining their carefully honed exteriors. (Indeed, her sculptures are inspired by temporary fixes made to the Tokyo subway to stop leaks from becoming a larger problem.) Accordingly, Mohri has even allowed light bulbs attached to long wires to fall down through the pavilion’s floor, where they can spotted by passersby before they enter.
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Lebanon
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg, Photo by Federico Vespignani ©️ LVAA Depending on who you ask, the Phoenician princess Europa was either wooed or assaulted by the Greek god Zeus, who became her lover after disguising himself as a bull. Lebanon’s representative, Monira Al Solh, seems to view Europa’s seduction as nonconsensual. Take one painting in Al Solh’s expansive installation A Dance with Her Myth (2024) showing a bound-up figure of ambiguous gender identity beside a bull on its back. Whatever is happening here, it isn’t pleasant. But Al Solh, keen to complicate the mythology surrounding Europa, never portrays this princess as a victim. In another painting hung from the ceiling next to that one, we see her from behind, a suitcase in tow, fearlessly venturing onward to whatever awaits her.
Al Solh appears most interested in Europa’s status as an immigrant, since, after being romanced, she departed Phoenicia for the island of Crete, where she became queen. Europe as we know it today is named after her; Al Solh is saying that the continent thus exists in a state of movement, even if some of its modern-day countries are not always so hospitable to migrants. (Al Solh herself is one: she was born in Beirut and now splits her time between that Lebanese city and Amsterdam.) The centerpiece of this pavilion, rather fittingly, is a large sculpture of a canoe strung with plastic water bottles that could not have existed during ancient times. This boat resembles the kind that frequently ferries refugees to Europe, whose population is filled with people similar to Europa.
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Czech Republic
Image Credit: Photo Aleksandra Vajd Question: When is a conceptual artwork a playground? Answer: When it takes the form of a cut-up giraffe whose innards are rendered using colorful, plushy material. That mutilated animal forms the centerpiece of Eva Koťátková’s Czech Pavilion, which pays homage to the brief life of Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya, then taken to the Prague Zoo, where she died two years later. Until 2000, her body was exhibited by the National Museum in Prague. Koťátková has now created her own institution for Lenka, one that’s meant to offer this mammal a more humane existence.
None of this seems to lend itself to levity, but when I visited, I had to make way for children who horsed around inside this makeshift giraffe’s neck. They didn’t seem to be aware of the audio emitting from within that told of Lenka’s fatal bout of pneumonia and the tragic role that colonialism played in her untimely demise. They also didn’t appear to mind the faux body parts—a plastic heart, skin-like strips—that were strewn about, and they didn’t check out the segment that Koťátková bore into the pavilion’s floor, a way of creating cracks within her own show. Still, I think the kids were onto something: they viewed this replica Lenka as one of their equals. Few who saw Lenka’s body at the National Museum probably had thought the same; the fact that Koťátková’s pavilion can instigate it is pretty inspiring.
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Lithuania
Image Credit: Photo Ugnius Gelguda/Courtesy the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art, and carlier | gebauer The most beautifully installed pavilion at this Biennale is Lithuania’s, a body horror extravaganza set within a 17th-century church. Before a marble altar, the duo Pakui Hardware has placed Inflammation (2023), a glorious installation filled with blobby glass elements set within a metal armature. The aluminum structure recalls medical equipment, while the glass pieces look a bit like organs. Beneath it all are piles of objects that recall synthetic fallen leaves. It’s a work about the fragile state of human bodies and the natural world, neither of which are in particularly good shape at the moment, thanks to a pandemic and global warming. By installing this work within a church, a setting for spiritual healing, the artists suggest that both may one day regain their strength and survive anew.
The ailing bodies invoked by Pakui Hardware seem to be on the verge of death, so perhaps it only makes sense that the duo also chose to exhibit work by a painter who is no longer with us. That artist, the terrific Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, created fantastical, foreboding visions that vibe nicely with Pakui Hardware’s installation—one from 1985 even features an ill person rigged up to a hospital bed that seems to double as a prison. But the Rožanskaitė painting I can’t stop thinking about is Reinforcement Rods (1986), a Christina Ramberg–like image of bent poles tethered to each other by taut bandaging. Rožanskaitė’s imagined structure seems to hang together by a thread, ready to fall apart at any moment. Somehow, it continues on.
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Poland
Image Credit: © Open Group There was huge potential for the Polish Pavilion to go sideways, given its late-in-the-game pivot to an entirely different artist earlier this year, but the choice of the Open Group, a Ukrainian collective, paid off brilliantly. On paper, the group’s contribution, an installation called Repeat After Me II (2024), seems too simple to work. It features two videos, both of which include interviews with Ukrainians who weathered Russia’s violent invasion. Some subjects in a 2022 video are shown speaking in Lviv, while others in that piece’s 2024 counterpart are pictured in Western Europe, where they now reside. What makes the work special, though, is less the words of these Ukrainians than what the Open Group has done with them.
When the interviewees describe the noises of mortars being fired and air raid sirens going off, their words appear as subtitles. These Ukrainians, looking the Open Group’s cameras dead in the eye, repeat these sounds over and over while the text is highlighted à la karaoke. Microphones await ambitious viewers who will heed the Open Group’s invitation, but when I visited, no one showed enough courage to get up there and intone “SSSSSS THUKH” alongside a woman mimicking blasts of artillery. Therein lies this beautiful work’s point: many people are still afraid to empathize with these refugees and speak out about what they have suffered.
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Croatia
Image Credit: Photo Hugo Glendinning Vlatka Horvat’s Croatian Pavilion offers little in the way of visual pleasure, which may prove frustrating for some who journey all the way to Cannaregio, a region far from the Arsenale and the Giardini, to see it. But what Horvat’s project lacks in aesthetic pizzazz it makes up for in conceptual richness.
For a project called By the Means at Hand, Horvat has enlisted the help of artist friends abroad to each create their own art, which she has exhibited as an installation. There were stipulations: the works could not be transported the typical way, via shipping, and instead had to be personally handed off by the artist to emissaries that provided them to Horvat. In exchange, Horvat gave each participant a collage of their own, which they had to exhibit in a semi-public place and photograph for her. And, to top it all off, the grouping of artworks shifts daily, meaning that the show itself is in flux. (To facilitate all this labor, Horvat will be in residency in Venice for the pavilion’s run.)
At the pavilion, one can trace the flow of artworks. You can see, for example, a drawing in which Ahmet Ögüt asks his heart to be donated to Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital upon his death and then find an image documenting the moment when the packaged work was given away by the artist. Horvat has created an installation that essentially documents a sprawling, fast-growing network of itinerant individuals—a project that is particularly meaningful to this diasporic artist, who was born in the former Yugoslavia and is now based in London. It’s impossible to know how Horvat’s pavilion will shift going forward, but that’s what makes it so endearing.
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Nigeria
Image Credit: Photo Marco Cappelleti Studio/Courtesy Museum of West African Art Inside a courtyard held within Nigeria’s pavilion, there’s a glass ball within a steel structure. It’s accompanied by overlapping transmissions, as though this were a makeshift radio tower able to receive static, pop music, political commentary, and more coming in from Nigeria. But this is no telecommunications structure: it’s an artwork by Precious Okoyomon, a standout from the 2022 Venice Biennale’s main show, who here returns with a work that envisions a Nigeria that exists outside Nigeria.
Okoyomon is one of eight talented artists representing Nigeria this year in the country’s second-ever Biennale pavilion. Meant as a teaser for Benin City’s Museum of West African Art, which organized the pavilion, the show is not quite so interesting as a preview of that forthcoming institution, whose future activities are given a good deal of play alongside the art. Instead, it’s more interesting as a glossy statement about the invisible memories that guide the Nigerian diaspora. Appropriately, many of the artists are of Nigerian descent but are not based in the country.
New York–based Toyin Ojih Odutola returns with fresh figurative paintings meant as something akin to the shrine-like Mbari houses created by the Igbo people, while London-based filmmaker Onyeka Igwe has newly revised work about a British-run production company based in Lagos. But it is lesser-known artists, like the young Toronto-based photographer Abraham Oghobase, who strike the greatest chord. Among the pictures Oghobase is showing is Colonial Self-Portrait 05 (2024), an image that blurs beyond recognition an appropriated 1960 photo of the last Brit in control of Nigeria and the first post-independence Prime Minister of the country. Those who were alive for that event and those who inherited others’ recollections of it may recognize that picture. Everyone else will simply view Oghobase’s version as two ghosts waving at us from the ether.
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Germany
Image Credit: Photo Andrea Rossetti National pavilions that contend with the very concept of nationhood tend to be dull, but this year’s German Pavilion, with its focus on in-between places and disparate spaces, is electrifying. Things start in the Giardini: Ersan Mondtag has covered the pavilion’s facade in a mound of dirt, and Yael Bartana is showing a video about space travel rooted in the Book of Isaiah. It’s weird, energizing stuff, and it’s no surprise that early on, people flocked there, generating lines extending outside the door.
People seemed either unaware or uninterested in the pavilion’s second half, located on the island of La Certosa (which is relatively remote, at least by the standards of how far Biennale visitors are willing to travel within Venice). There, a grouping of sound artworks staged outdoors emit high-pitched frequencies and the noise of trees talking to one another. The best of the bunch, a Nicole L’Huillier piece composed of microphones sandwiched between sheets of plastic, is also the strangest. These works are draped like flayed skins across branches, whose sounds are played nearby.
Andrew Durbin panned the pavilion in his Frieze roundup of the Giardini’s offerings, referring only to the works by Mondtag and Bartana. But to consider this pavilion without its La Certosa portion is to mistake a part for a whole. The German Pavilion is a standout this year because it is so dramatically split apart, requiring viewers to journey beyond the presentations put on by other countries within the main part of Venice. If the Biennale’s national model must evolve going forward (and it should), the future is already here, and it looks like Germany’s pavilion.